After talking in class, seeing the amount of ISATs, NAEPs, EOCs, and other crappy tests students are inundated with, and reading about types of authentic tests, I am afraid, overwhelmed, and excited in regards to assessment ideas and my future role in preparing student as competitors in a modern world. I have been wondering how I can still prepare students to take these silly tests, but give them more authentic assessments, but also help students use the type of collaborative problem solving that is so important in our modern society.
When I think of "testing," I imagine this stretching out before me, endlessly into the distance.
I bet that students do too. And since they DO have to take some of these types of tests during their lives, I think it is important that we give them the skills to take these tests well. I think that they should practice taking these types of tests in the classroom, and be taught strategies for ruling out wrong answers, reading problems carefully, understanding the directions, correlating answer options to bubbles, etc. Like it or not, students need to know this stuff in today's educational climate.
But, other than giving students practice at these tests and teaching them these non-content-based skills (ruling out wrong answers, etc.), it seems that we don't need to just teach this rote material. Wilhelm says specifically that, if you follow an inquiry approach, even though you aren't "covering" the information required to know for the text, if you "uncover" the information through complex thinking, the students know it better anyway and their test scores go up. I am comforted that research has actually shown that inquiry based units and lessons still do a better job at teaching students important content and skills - and that this results in higher standardized crap-o-la test achievement.
Just watching the 8th graders I observe, I have seen them have to take EOCs, the NAEP test, and the various ISATs all in just one semester. What a heavy load of testing and testing skills these students need to have! But ultimately, I would like to make most of my assessments the types of complex, messy, progress and growth-centric tests that we have discussed in class. Portfolios and real-world problem solving opportunities seem to be Where It's At in terms of authentic assessments - so I hope to be able to combine these types of assessments with some teaching of the "standardized test" skills that the students unfortunately need. In a real-world environment, many people create portfolios and submit them to employers. People have big problems that they must learn to solve together, or little problems for which they must come up with innovative solutions (sometimes over time, sometimes on the fly). People are also often surrounded by resources (other people, books, the internet, etc.) to use to help solve these problems. Since these are the type of real-world problem-solving conditions people will face, I think these should be the types of conditions under which assessments should take place.
This picture made me think of modern-day collaboration... sort-of. :) Mostly it just made me giggle. But in modern society, we are almost never in a vacuum. Students shouldn't be either as they create portfolios or do projects together to solve problems and make new discoveries. Modern society also doesn't usually ever have a big "right answer" plastered on it either - so I don't want our assessments to foster this either.
I was thinking - perhaps this emphasis on standardized vs. authentic/messy assessments could be integrated into an inquiry project! Like, say we add a week or two into my "What is the Truth?" unit and throw some of this stuff in there. I could have students look at several types of tests and evaluate each one. They could practice taking different types of tests over the exact same bit of content, or read research about the type of knowledge these different types of tests can assess. Then they could come up with their own ideas about test scores mean - and how is this the "truth" about your intelligence? Your knowledge? Your ability to apply this content to different situations? I might be stretching the idea a little here, but maybe an awareness of these types of tests (and the need for them to be proficient at all of them, even if I don't like it) and an exploration of what they REALLY assess could be a great part of any inquiry project. I would have to be careful not to say "ISATs are the devil" or something, but I could help them explore the different uses for those tests, and show them how to be successful but knowledgeable about the tests and their role in their school lives.
Ultimately, I want to do EVERYTHING and incorporate EVERYTHING into EVERY SINGLE UNIT FOREVER. I know this won't work - but I hope that I can throw in meaningful, awesome assessments like portfolios and problems to solve (with some workplace relevant stuff in there too!), with practice on the boring-er assessments in there too. You know, maybe I could have an entire unit be based around some type of question like, "How do people make themselves understood?" and frame it around a workplace! Like, I am the Office Manager and each student has their own office role. We could delve into cool modern texts, and students can communicate with me via memos, e-mails, professional twitter posts, etc.... I am going off on a tangent. And this is starting to dangerously sound like "activity based" instruction, now that I think about it... but anyway. Assessment is complex. And I will try to do lots of different kinds, because students will need to do different kinds too.
MY ULTRA FINAL PROJECT
This is my Unit Calendar (which contains the resource list and essential questions for the unit and for the lessons):
This document (below) contains the Learning Goals and Standards, Lesson Plans (with appendices immediately following - plus I included appendices that aren't in my lesson plans, but since they are ongoing tools I felt they were important to include and they have been inserted in chronological order), Performance Tasks (my formative assessment is one of my lessons and is labeled, my summative assessment follows my lesson plans), and my unit rationale at the end.
Also, some Appendices were pdf files on my computer - so in order to insert them into this document I had to do all sorts of stupid crap (since it wouldn't let me convert it to a picture and paste it in there, I had do to the "printscreen" business, and crop THAT picture of the document, and then paste it in - after which it did all sorts of stupid formatting crap-ola). So they aren't really perfectly centered on the pages and I have no idea how to fix it due to all the auto-formatting stuff.
Well, big whoops here. I completely forgot this entire assignment - I took an extreme homework break for the sake of my sanity and didn't even THINK about this until yesterday night when I ventured back into homework world. I'm sorry - this is way past the deadline but I will put some stuff here and post some comments anyway.
I have been thinking hard about discussion, because what I thought was discussion is actually a horrible case of "guess what's in the teacher's head." I am having to carefully re-format what I think discussion is - and what my role will be (and is!) as an in-progress teacher. As both Wilhelm and McCann note, the teacher's role is that of a "facilitator and guide, not an answer giver" (Wilhelm 37), and I love how McCann gives very specific things you can do to foster better discussion and explains them in detail in sections. These sections are: "Framing Questions for Discussion," "Building a Stage for Participation," "Offering Answer Choices," "Providing Response," and "Preparing Students to Contribute" (McCann 11-15). In reading these sections from both books, I have been comparing "discussions" I have led in the past to the models presented in these books (and in our class!) and have seen how different they are. And though I am nervous about implementing them, when I really think about it, these strategies take a lot of the pressure off of us as teachers. Nowhere are we expected to be the Sage, All-Knowing Experts on whatever we are discussing - we are expected to help guide the conversation that the students have with each other.
I am especially nervous because my mentor teacher has a free day next Thursday and told me I could plan and teach whatever I wanted for that day. I have helped a lot one-on-one in her classes, and administered the occasional quiz, but I haven't actually taught anything or ran an entire class by myself. This makes me extremely nervous - but I am modeling my lesson after McCann's scenario activity in Chapter 3. My mentor teacher is finishing up a mystery unit and moving on to Anne Frank after the day I teach, so I am doing a little Anne Frank frontloading. We discussed her plans for the Anne Frank unit, and she talked about how they would be learning about the Holocaust, Hitler, and exploring what the ideas of right and wrong are and how they are closely related to a person's perspective. They will be creating a collage of "right" things and "wrong" things in the beginning, and then will revisit the ideas as the unit goes along to see if they still have such a clear picture of what is right and what is wrong - and the idea is that their thoughts on the subject will change over time. I was thinking that this is a great essential question, so I framed my scenario activity around this right/wrong idea. But, in order to do it, it involves a lot of discussion. So in a way, this post comes at a perfect time (well, if I had completed it when I should have), since I will be trying to implement some of these ideas about discussion next week!
I have been looking at McCann's handy dandy Tip lists for facilitating discussions on pages 15 and 53, and I want to keep some of these on a piece of paper (along with some questions to help people along) to give myself some reassurance. I want to specifically make sure I give students adequate wait time (I need to come up with a song to sing in my head...), work to rephrase questions if they aren't clear, re-phrase student responses to clarify and give other students a chance to respond, and ask lots of "does anyone have anything to add?" or "Ametsa, it looks like you are nodding, do you agree with what Matthew said?" sort of stuff. I also was struck by a section in the McCann book that said to defer praise. In my job, I do a lot to look for good things to praise (because then people do them more afterward!!), but this will be an interesting change in thinking. McCang points out that praise basically shuts down conversation. I mean, what can you really SAY when someone says "Ooh, that's interesting, good response!" Pretty much nothing but "uh, thanks." So that is something to work on when leading discussions too - so that I don't shut things down because I am trying to create warm fuzzies.
And I have written too much now, so I am stopping.
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MY Comments in blue below--Rachel
Sunday, March 13th
"Mysterious Circumstances" Tentative Unit Plan and OTHER THINGS
Here is my tentative unit plan and schedule. I have realized that there are many worksheet-y things HA! I love this term for them :) I am glad you are starting to create these and include them--each one will be an appendix in your final Annotated Unit Plan Portfolio. I would call this an "Essential Question Tracking Sheet" for students. This gives them a reminder that you are always returning to your Essential Questions and these sheets are a place for tracking "data" that will assist them when they begin the culminating project. I needed to design, so I included those as well (at least, what I have of them so far). After a lot of thinking, I also decided that my original final project doesn't well reflect what is going on in my unit, nice move! it is great to see you thinking and reflecting and modifying your thinking as you go. so I changed it. I decided to put an in-progress copy of my final project description and rubric here as well.
And as a random note - I know my final project description rubric isn't actually a real RUBRIC, it is something else... but I can't remember exactly what it is. It is some other type of assessment tool, but it isn't exactly a rubric. Is that okay? That is okay! you have the ultimate say in what will be evidence of understanding and how you will measure that. As long as you have some tool for doing this it is fine with me. Should I get my Rubistar on and construct a honest-to-goodness rubric for this project?
"Speckled Band" Vocabulary Log:
I am very disappointed by this, but for some reason this document won't post here. The same error keeps coming up, even when I saved the document under a different name and tried to embed it that way. :(
Culminating Project Description and sort-of Rubric:
For the sake of getting this stuff out, here are some thoughts I am having:
I need to complete a "What Do Mysteries Do?"I agree!!! worksheet (I think) to similarly compare with the "What Do Folk Tales Do?" worksheet. I want it to help them document their progress through the story somehow... maybe it should be more specific to "The Adventures of the Speckled Band" to help them chronicle what they notice about the story (as a model for a typical mystery) and what this story specifically is doing in terms of plot, clues, characters, etc.
I also am wondering if I need to plan for a whole additional week. if you need it and your mentor teacher is okay with it, then add it! Far too often we aren't flexible enough with time and try to "blast through" and "cover" curriculum and then we end up going an inch deep and a mile wide when it should be the other way around. If I am not mistaken, Meridian has four "units" like this, right? That suggests that you should have up to nine weeks for each of them. I get the idea that if I just blow through texts with out providing enough time and activities to process them very nice!!!, it won't be worthwhile - so I actually cut out "Tell-Tale Heart" (since it doesn't seem to really demonstrate anything contextually important any more other than spooky vocabulary) and tried to do more actual processing of the texts. BUT, since "Speckled Band" is so long, it has become students' sole exposure to mystery, which I don't like. I feel like maybe with a 6th week, I could put another short mystery in there (after frontloading, maybe?) for a day or two, and then also allow more time to process "Speckled Band" and to help do some good work on "Horseman in the Sky." But I ALSO am wondering how to go through "Horseman" and to help students get through it without leading them to view it as a mystery or a folk tale in one way or another - since their final project will be making a case for either.
Sigh. I am glad we have more time to work on these. Friday, February 25th==
"Reflecting on Engagement" Post
In thinking about student engagement and the sin of activity based instruction, I keep coming back to the Music Education classes that I'm taking right now. I am working on a music endorsement, but I would love to teach general music, music history, or music appreciation of some sorts. If I had to lead an orchestra, I would do it. But I have been discovering through these classes that most people who become music teachers want to lead award-winning marching bands, or conduct huge student orchestras, and that these other "sideline" classes like music history are often looked down upon and given less teacher energy because they are sort-of "fillers" that the school requires them to teach to fill up their class loads. And in music ed textbooks, it is almost appalling to me how little emphasis there is on planning of any kind. It gets lip-service and a few paragraphs ("You need to know what you're teaching, have a direction, blah blah blah"), but the main emphasis is on hitting standards. I am over-simplifying here, because obviously these textbooks and my professors want good teaching to take place (and they help give many examples of good teaching practices), but the general gist seems to be that planning is good, but not strictly necessarily in all contexts. My textbooks say to beware that you do too little planning, even if you are in charge of a performance group where you are mainly just rehearsing music. But why can't rehearsing music be subject to backwards planning and inquiry as well? Aren't pieces of music just the texts you use to get to certain understandings??
I guess the whole reason I went on that huge tangent up there is because THIS class is forcing me to compare the practices of Wilhelm and Wiggins/McTighe to what I am learning in music ed, and to the ways I was taught music AND English AND every other subject as I was growing up. And when I look back, I am grossly disappointed. I understand that a performance group needs to take chunks of time to learn and play music. And performing groups are huge places of belonging and camaraderie, so it's not like a lack of inquiry based instruction in music classes has made students students hate music. But what if this type of instruction WERE used in those type of groups? What if this stuff wasn't limited to English, like we are doing, and it was extended to Math and Science and Music History and every subject under the sun! Both of our textbooks cite examples from the other subjects, so I know that backwards planning and inquiry-based design shouldn't be limited. But it seems that students could be SO much more engaged, feel SO much more involved, and SO much more INVESTED in these other subjects if these practices were extended to them!
I'd better answer the actual required questions here so I don't get TOO off track. But it seems that real, engaging instruction is instruction that is well-planned and purposeful. It has to fit in with a greater whole, because then it makes logical sense to students as time goes on. If a student gets a little of this and a little of that thrown in here and there, what is the point? Kids aren't stupid - and I think they want to be treated like they are capable of complex thinking. Engaging instruction also has to hook students by involving them personally. This closely relates to what we have been discussing in our concurrent class, Ed-Literacy 444: prior knowledge. If you have complex ideas or concepts students need to understand, then you need to backtrack far enough to engage their prior knowledge and build upon that. Then they can put a personal claw into the topic, so to speak, and then sort-of crawl up from there into these new areas of understanding. In here, that relates to our frontloading activities, which ask students to connect big questions to their own lives. I suppose we need to get that hook or claw or whatever activated, where they can connect something personally to their own lives and get really rooted in an Essential Question so that they will continue to be engaged in the learning they do together throughout units.
Here is a kind-of fun picture I found that offers a simplified visual representation of what inquiry-based learning looks like. I just thought it was a fun way to look at things.
It doesn't quite follow exactly what we are doing, but I liked it.
Friday, February 25th
Text Timeline (to visualize this in my brain)
I wanted to graph this somewhere where I could easily modify it and change it as I need to, so I figure I'll do it here. I feel like I need a visual of the weeks for my unit and where my texts will fit into those weeks.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Texts Used
Short folk tales
"A Horseman in the Sky"
"Tell-Tale Heart"
"The Adventures of the
Speckled Band"
"The Adventures of the
Speckled Band"
Small primary
source documents
Maybe other primary
source documents?
Final Project
Thursday, February 17th
Addendum to my Unit Topic Memo
After looking looking at the resources more, I think I would like to use an assortment of little folk tales I found online, "A Horseman in the Sky," "Tell Tale Heart," and "The Adventures of the Speckled Band." Maybe I can work on each text or type of text for a week or so, and then spend two weeks at the end on "The Adventures" because it is a longer text. I want to expose students to lots of different types of texts involving folklore and mystery, and perhaps begin with more accessible folklore. I want to connect folklore (which is often written based on a mystery that wasn't solved) to other, more traditional mystery texts and some spooky texts ("Tell Tale Heart" will serve as my spooky text).
Now that I have processed this more in my brain, I think I would like to focus on a few key enduring understandings and their associated learning standards:
Understandings: Folklore is beliefs, tales, customs, traditions passed down through generations; mysteries are enduring questions; investigation = searching for evidence and understanding; logic is reasonable, reliable, and believable, and logic is the use of reason/acts to support a point
I think I can connect these because folklore is often based in cultural mysteries that couldn't be solved, and mysteries are questions we want to solve, and in order to solve these mysteries we have to investigate them, and we have to use logical thinking to try to solve mysteries or potentially figure out where folk tales come from. Hopefully, this all makes sense under the one Big Question, "What is truth?"
Learning Standards: Comprehension and interpretation (acquire skills for comprehending text, make inferences, determine cause and effect relationships, etc.); writing applications (write a narrative text); Reading process (acquire concepts about texts via analyzing their features)
For my final project, I am thinking of switching things from my original plan. Perhaps, at the end, I could give them a choice of folk tales and have students re-write the folk tales as a short mystery that gets solved. Or, I can give students the option of taking a mystery and turning it into a folk tale. I can provide a few mystery and folk tale choices so that students have some element of choice and interest, and I can make a rubric with very specific elements so that their writings contain key items we talked about.
Sunday, February 13th
Annotated Unit Plan Portfolio Assignment #1 - Unit Topic Memo!
The second quarter 8th grade English unit in the Meridian School District is called "Mysterious Circumstances." In the curriculum, it says the Unit Topic is "Mysterious Circumstances" and the Conceptual Lens is "Investigation." This leads me to infer that maybe this unit can be driven by investigation (dur) but that it could involve research, interacting with different types of texts, and sifting through muddy stories/data/issues and trying to come up with conclusions during and afterward. I am a little confused about how to go about this - but I know we will figure it out!!
List of Resources:
There are many suggested unit resources listed with this unit. Many of them are story selections from a Prentice Hall textbook, and they could be pretty useful. They include these stories:
"The Adventures of the Speckled Band"
"Tell Tale Heart" (I would like to try to use this text, but only for selfish reasons - I just like it a lot)
"Glow in the Dark"
"Lights in the Night"
"The Horseman in the Sky"
"The Landlady"
There are also several selections of reading from the textbook, like sections entitled "Strange Doings," "Extraordinary in the Ordinary," and "American Folk Tradition." It also lists the possibility of using the Write Source 2000 and using student-selected mystery titles.
I don't really know much about these short stories, but I think I would like to see if I can find a greater variety of materials. I would like to get some conflicting primary source documents, if I can, to help students get some experience with wrestling through and "investigating" different accounts of one event/time/something.
Learning Goals and Standards:
Meridian has a huge list of "Critical Skills" (divided into Standards, which contain Goals which then contain specific Skills) that are expected to be taught at any time during the school year (though the unit and the methods are up to the teacher's discretion). This list is valuable - but it is also 18 pages long, so I have compiled a basic list here:
Reading Process (acquire concepts about texts via analyzing organizational structures/features/graphics of texts, decoding texts using word parts, acquire fluency, develop vocab and concept understandings, etc.)
Comprehension and Interpretation (acquire skills/strategies for comprehending text [e.g. distinguish cause and effect relationships, make inferences, apply ideas, generate how/why/what-if questions to texts, understand organization, respond to text, understand literary devices, etc.)
Writing Process (be able to pre-write, generate ideas, make drafts, revise/edit/proofread, conference with others, publish writing with audience in mind, etc.)
Writing Applications (write narratives using specific types of language, write technical text, write expository essays, write persuasive essays, respond to literature, etc.)
Writing Components (acquire handwriting skills, write legibly and fluently, be able to spell words correctly, acquire skills for sentence structure, use conventions, apply capitalization and punctuation correctly, etc.)
Communication (acquire listening skills, be able to summarize info from many sources, evaluate the credibility of a speaker, acquire speaking skills, organize an aural presentation, use verbal and non-verbal communication, etc.)
THEN there is a whole section about "Reading Strategies" to use before, during, and after reading, and then there is a whole section just on PACE that outlines the specific skills (organized according to Standards, like above) that should be honed during this project. Sigh.
BUT - towards the end, each unit has a Unit Planner page! It has a web-type organizer graphic, which lists the unit topic and then other topics that branch out from that unit topic. Each unit also has lists of suggested unit resources (with books, poems, and stories listed), a list of required "Enduring Understandings," and suggested "Guiding Questions." There is also a section of Required Critical Content, which I bet I should focus on. These content ideas/standards are:
Folklore: tales, beliefs, customs, or other traditions of a people or region handed through generations
Investigation requires asking questions and searching for facts, information, or evidence
Defining is explaining the meaning of a word or concept by listing various characteristics or qualities of the term
Logic is the use of reason, acts, and examples to support a point
Logical thinking is reasonable, reliable, and believable
Mysteries are enduring questions
Elements of mysteries include foreshadowing and suspense
My list of all this stuff is to help me see a summarized, year-long overview of what should be learned while peeking at the smaller pieces on which I should focus. Does that make sense? I am guessing that I should focus on the sort-of understandings required in this "Critical Content" while throwing in the more specific "Critical Skills" listed above to help achieve these understandings.
Essential Questions:
I am having trouble making these questions sexy. Here are my beginning thoughts:
What makes a mystery? What are some real-life mysteries occurring today?
Where do folk tales come from? How do you know the difference between "truth" and "folklore?"
What is "the truth?" How can you tell what really happened, what was really said, and who was really there?
How can one event be described so differently by different people?
Ideas for Culminating Performance Assessment:
I was thinking of doing a sort-of project, where I give students a few documents that tell conflicting stories about something (a situation at the gas station? a religious experience? a spooky event from the 1750s? I don't know yet...), and then ask them to do something with these documents. Maybe look at all of them and write a news article trying to explain what happened while taking into account the different sources and trying to come to some conclusion (perhaps coming to the conclusion that there is NO conclusion!). Or maybe doing a presentation that shows the discrepancies between the sources? Some sort of project that asks students to reason through the documents, try to figure out a basic idea of what happened, identify the difference between the sources, try to posit why those differences exist, and maybe piece together what could have happened based on incomplete data. I want to tie it to the folklore somehow - maybe two of the documents could be semi-factual accounts and one could be a folk-tale about this event. Hmmmm.
Monday, January 31st - Learning!
Well, even though this post is abysmally late, I will weigh in.
Concerning the meaning of the word "learning," my perception of this has changed dramatically over just the last couple of weeks. The Understanding by Design book has highlighted a lot of interesting discrepancies for me between the idea of "good teaching" and "student achievement" and the actual act of "learning" something. As I look back over my schooling over the years, I realize how little I was actually expected to demonstrate real "learning." Instead, I was asked to regurgitate facts or ideas that someone else had told me, or asked to plug different numbers into the same type of problem. I hadn't considered that the hallmark of real learning is the ability to take your knowledge and then apply it to different situations in new ways, and now I realize that I didn't really learn much at all in some of my classes. Even now, as I am reading these textbooks, I see myself thinking about my reading in a new way. Am I just skimming this so I can check this chapter off in my planner? Can I summarize what this book said in my own words when I am done with the chapter? Will I remember enough of it to be able to reference it in our classroom discussions? I feel like I can't be as complacent anymore, because this is stuff I really want to REMEMBER and be able to, again, transfer to other environments and situations.
After reading Wilhelm chapters, I also am hoping that this book will help us to better understand how assess whether learning is happening in the classroom. I am excited at the prospect of introducing students to a new topic of learning by presenting them with a conundrum, a puzzle, or some life situation that they will need to understand and learn how to solve throughout the course of a unit. It seems that the route to assessing real learning involves lots of questions to the students, and lots of creative ways of getting the students to ascend those levels of understanding and get to the "synthesis" level of Bloom's Taxonomy. This idea of backwards planning, using lots of in-the-moment, informal assessments, and using culminating assessments to determine whether you have guided students to greater levels of understanding and transfer of knowledge is really overwhelming to me. How do teachers have time to LIVE when all of this is going on? How do you not spend hours and hours carefully crafting these types of lessons? I have heard that the first two years of teaching are a doozy, but that after that it gets easier as you get quicker at planning and have a larger lesson/activity repertoire to draw from. But right now, it ALL looks overwhelming, and I am glad that this class is specifically focused on these aspects of lesson planning so that we can be better prepared.
Reflecting on these ideas about learning has made me think hard about the way my mentor teacher teaches. I have a lot of respect for this woman, and I am very grateful to have her as a mentor and to see the types of classes she teaches. She has one Literacy Lab, with 8 students who need extra help to succeed in their English classes, and then the rest of her classes are 8th grade honors English and 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Challenge. There is such a stark contrast between the Lab students and the Honors/Challenge students, and sometimes it is very frustrating for her because she tries to reach these higher levels of learning outcomes with her Lab students but it is like pulling teeth just to get them to answer questions. Her normal method of answering student questions is by asking them more questions. She says this drives her kids crazy sometimes, but I am noticing how much it initiates discussion and requires the students to really THINK about what they are saying. She tries to get the students to answer their own questions by making them reflect on what they already know and use it to figure out what they don't - if that makes sense. I think she provides a great model of the ways you can try to bring students to that higher level of understanding, and of the ways you can do informal assessments just though discussion. I feel like our class texts are a perfect supplement to my involvement in her classroom - I just hope that there is a way to integrate this type of learning and assessment for the kids who need "lab" classes. For them, they seem to need help with the simplest of skills, and even with very simple tasks they totally shut down when she asks any type of self-reflective question or doesn't give them a straight up answer. She says that you have to train your students to respond to her style of teaching. Maybe these lab students haven't been trained? They are used to just being given the answers? They don't care enough about school to want to have to do more than regurgitate facts? I don't know, and I don't know how to get over that hurdle. Hopefully over the course of the semester we will find out!
Sound Clips for my Learning Autobiography Presentation:
Clip #1: To represent my negative learning experiences...
Clip #2: To represent my positive learning experiences...
Sunday, March 8th
Reflecting on Hot Topics
After talking in class, seeing the amount of ISATs, NAEPs, EOCs, and other crappy tests students are inundated with, and reading about types of authentic tests, I am afraid, overwhelmed, and excited in regards to assessment ideas and my future role in preparing student as competitors in a modern world. I have been wondering how I can still prepare students to take these silly tests, but give them more authentic assessments, but also help students use the type of collaborative problem solving that is so important in our modern society.
When I think of "testing," I imagine this stretching out before me, endlessly into the distance.
I bet that students do too. And since they DO have to take some of these types of tests during their lives, I think it is important that we give them the skills to take these tests well. I think that they should practice taking these types of tests in the classroom, and be taught strategies for ruling out wrong answers, reading problems carefully, understanding the directions, correlating answer options to bubbles, etc. Like it or not, students need to know this stuff in today's educational climate.
But, other than giving students practice at these tests and teaching them these non-content-based skills (ruling out wrong answers, etc.), it seems that we don't need to just teach this rote material. Wilhelm says specifically that, if you follow an inquiry approach, even though you aren't "covering" the information required to know for the text, if you "uncover" the information through complex thinking, the students know it better anyway and their test scores go up. I am comforted that research has actually shown that inquiry based units and lessons still do a better job at teaching students important content and skills - and that this results in higher standardized crap-o-la test achievement.
Just watching the 8th graders I observe, I have seen them have to take EOCs, the NAEP test, and the various ISATs all in just one semester. What a heavy load of testing and testing skills these students need to have! But ultimately, I would like to make most of my assessments the types of complex, messy, progress and growth-centric tests that we have discussed in class. Portfolios and real-world problem solving opportunities seem to be Where It's At in terms of authentic assessments - so I hope to be able to combine these types of assessments with some teaching of the "standardized test" skills that the students unfortunately need. In a real-world environment, many people create portfolios and submit them to employers. People have big problems that they must learn to solve together, or little problems for which they must come up with innovative solutions (sometimes over time, sometimes on the fly). People are also often surrounded by resources (other people, books, the internet, etc.) to use to help solve these problems. Since these are the type of real-world problem-solving conditions people will face, I think these should be the types of conditions under which assessments should take place.
This picture made me think of modern-day collaboration... sort-of. :) Mostly it just made me giggle. But in modern society, we are almost never in a vacuum. Students shouldn't be either as they create portfolios or do projects together to solve problems and make new discoveries. Modern society also doesn't usually ever have a big "right answer" plastered on it either - so I don't want our assessments to foster this either.
I was thinking - perhaps this emphasis on standardized vs. authentic/messy assessments could be integrated into an inquiry project! Like, say we add a week or two into my "What is the Truth?" unit and throw some of this stuff in there. I could have students look at several types of tests and evaluate each one. They could practice taking different types of tests over the exact same bit of content, or read research about the type of knowledge these different types of tests can assess. Then they could come up with their own ideas about test scores mean - and how is this the "truth" about your intelligence? Your knowledge? Your ability to apply this content to different situations? I might be stretching the idea a little here, but maybe an awareness of these types of tests (and the need for them to be proficient at all of them, even if I don't like it) and an exploration of what they REALLY assess could be a great part of any inquiry project. I would have to be careful not to say "ISATs are the devil" or something, but I could help them explore the different uses for those tests, and show them how to be successful but knowledgeable about the tests and their role in their school lives.
Ultimately, I want to do EVERYTHING and incorporate EVERYTHING into EVERY SINGLE UNIT FOREVER. I know this won't work - but I hope that I can throw in meaningful, awesome assessments like portfolios and problems to solve (with some workplace relevant stuff in there too!), with practice on the boring-er assessments in there too. You know, maybe I could have an entire unit be based around some type of question like, "How do people make themselves understood?" and frame it around a workplace! Like, I am the Office Manager and each student has their own office role. We could delve into cool modern texts, and students can communicate with me via memos, e-mails, professional twitter posts, etc.... I am going off on a tangent. And this is starting to dangerously sound like "activity based" instruction, now that I think about it... but anyway. Assessment is complex. And I will try to do lots of different kinds, because students will need to do different kinds too.
MY ULTRA FINAL PROJECT
This is my Unit Calendar (which contains the resource list and essential questions for the unit and for the lessons):
This document (below) contains the Learning Goals and Standards, Lesson Plans (with appendices immediately following - plus I included appendices that aren't in my lesson plans, but since they are ongoing tools I felt they were important to include and they have been inserted in chronological order), Performance Tasks (my formative assessment is one of my lessons and is labeled, my summative assessment follows my lesson plans), and my unit rationale at the end.
Also, some Appendices were pdf files on my computer - so in order to insert them into this document I had to do all sorts of stupid crap (since it wouldn't let me convert it to a picture and paste it in there, I had do to the "printscreen" business, and crop THAT picture of the document, and then paste it in - after which it did all sorts of stupid formatting crap-ola). So they aren't really perfectly centered on the pages and I have no idea how to fix it due to all the auto-formatting stuff.
The end!
Wednesday, March 30th
"Reflecting on Discussion" PostWell, big whoops here. I completely forgot this entire assignment - I took an extreme homework break for the sake of my sanity and didn't even THINK about this until yesterday night when I ventured back into homework world. I'm sorry - this is way past the deadline but I will put some stuff here and post some comments anyway.
I have been thinking hard about discussion, because what I thought was discussion is actually a horrible case of "guess what's in the teacher's head." I am having to carefully re-format what I think discussion is - and what my role will be (and is!) as an in-progress teacher. As both Wilhelm and McCann note, the teacher's role is that of a "facilitator and guide, not an answer giver" (Wilhelm 37), and I love how McCann gives very specific things you can do to foster better discussion and explains them in detail in sections. These sections are: "Framing Questions for Discussion," "Building a Stage for Participation," "Offering Answer Choices," "Providing Response," and "Preparing Students to Contribute" (McCann 11-15). In reading these sections from both books, I have been comparing "discussions" I have led in the past to the models presented in these books (and in our class!) and have seen how different they are. And though I am nervous about implementing them, when I really think about it, these strategies take a lot of the pressure off of us as teachers. Nowhere are we expected to be the Sage, All-Knowing Experts on whatever we are discussing - we are expected to help guide the conversation that the students have with each other.
I am especially nervous because my mentor teacher has a free day next Thursday and told me I could plan and teach whatever I wanted for that day. I have helped a lot one-on-one in her classes, and administered the occasional quiz, but I haven't actually taught anything or ran an entire class by myself. This makes me extremely nervous - but I am modeling my lesson after McCann's scenario activity in Chapter 3. My mentor teacher is finishing up a mystery unit and moving on to Anne Frank after the day I teach, so I am doing a little Anne Frank frontloading. We discussed her plans for the Anne Frank unit, and she talked about how they would be learning about the Holocaust, Hitler, and exploring what the ideas of right and wrong are and how they are closely related to a person's perspective. They will be creating a collage of "right" things and "wrong" things in the beginning, and then will revisit the ideas as the unit goes along to see if they still have such a clear picture of what is right and what is wrong - and the idea is that their thoughts on the subject will change over time. I was thinking that this is a great essential question, so I framed my scenario activity around this right/wrong idea. But, in order to do it, it involves a lot of discussion. So in a way, this post comes at a perfect time (well, if I had completed it when I should have), since I will be trying to implement some of these ideas about discussion next week!
I have been looking at McCann's handy dandy Tip lists for facilitating discussions on pages 15 and 53, and I want to keep some of these on a piece of paper (along with some questions to help people along) to give myself some reassurance. I want to specifically make sure I give students adequate wait time (I need to come up with a song to sing in my head...), work to rephrase questions if they aren't clear, re-phrase student responses to clarify and give other students a chance to respond, and ask lots of "does anyone have anything to add?" or "Ametsa, it looks like you are nodding, do you agree with what Matthew said?" sort of stuff. I also was struck by a section in the McCann book that said to defer praise. In my job, I do a lot to look for good things to praise (because then people do them more afterward!!), but this will be an interesting change in thinking. McCang points out that praise basically shuts down conversation. I mean, what can you really SAY when someone says "Ooh, that's interesting, good response!" Pretty much nothing but "uh, thanks." So that is something to work on when leading discussions too - so that I don't shut things down because I am trying to create warm fuzzies.
And I have written too much now, so I am stopping.
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MY Comments in blue below--Rachel
Sunday, March 13th
"Mysterious Circumstances" Tentative Unit Plan and OTHER THINGS
Here is my tentative unit plan and schedule. I have realized that there are many worksheet-y things HA! I love this term for them :) I am glad you are starting to create these and include them--each one will be an appendix in your final Annotated Unit Plan Portfolio. I would call this an "Essential Question Tracking Sheet" for students. This gives them a reminder that you are always returning to your Essential Questions and these sheets are a place for tracking "data" that will assist them when they begin the culminating project. I needed to design, so I included those as well (at least, what I have of them so far). After a lot of thinking, I also decided that my original final project doesn't well reflect what is going on in my unit, nice move! it is great to see you thinking and reflecting and modifying your thinking as you go. so I changed it. I decided to put an in-progress copy of my final project description and rubric here as well.
And as a random note - I know my final project description rubric isn't actually a real RUBRIC, it is something else... but I can't remember exactly what it is. It is some other type of assessment tool, but it isn't exactly a rubric. Is that okay? That is okay! you have the ultimate say in what will be evidence of understanding and how you will measure that. As long as you have some tool for doing this it is fine with me. Should I get my Rubistar on and construct a honest-to-goodness rubric for this project?
Unit Plan:
"What do Folk Tales Do?" Worksheet:
"Speckled Band" Vocabulary Log:
I am very disappointed by this, but for some reason this document won't post here. The same error keeps coming up, even when I saved the document under a different name and tried to embed it that way. :(
Culminating Project Description and sort-of Rubric:
For the sake of getting this stuff out, here are some thoughts I am having:
I need to complete a "What Do Mysteries Do?" I agree!!! worksheet (I think) to similarly compare with the "What Do Folk Tales Do?" worksheet. I want it to help them document their progress through the story somehow... maybe it should be more specific to "The Adventures of the Speckled Band" to help them chronicle what they notice about the story (as a model for a typical mystery) and what this story specifically is doing in terms of plot, clues, characters, etc.
I also am wondering if I need to plan for a whole additional week. if you need it and your mentor teacher is okay with it, then add it! Far too often we aren't flexible enough with time and try to "blast through" and "cover" curriculum and then we end up going an inch deep and a mile wide when it should be the other way around. If I am not mistaken, Meridian has four "units" like this, right? That suggests that you should have up to nine weeks for each of them. I get the idea that if I just blow through texts with out providing enough time and activities to process them very nice!!!, it won't be worthwhile - so I actually cut out "Tell-Tale Heart" (since it doesn't seem to really demonstrate anything contextually important any more other than spooky vocabulary) and tried to do more actual processing of the texts. BUT, since "Speckled Band" is so long, it has become students' sole exposure to mystery, which I don't like. I feel like maybe with a 6th week, I could put another short mystery in there (after frontloading, maybe?) for a day or two, and then also allow more time to process "Speckled Band" and to help do some good work on "Horseman in the Sky." But I ALSO am wondering how to go through "Horseman" and to help students get through it without leading them to view it as a mystery or a folk tale in one way or another - since their final project will be making a case for either.
Sigh. I am glad we have more time to work on these.
Friday, February 25th==
"Reflecting on Engagement" Post
In thinking about student engagement and the sin of activity based instruction, I keep coming back to the Music Education classes that I'm taking right now. I am working on a music endorsement, but I would love to teach general music, music history, or music appreciation of some sorts. If I had to lead an orchestra, I would do it. But I have been discovering through these classes that most people who become music teachers want to lead award-winning marching bands, or conduct huge student orchestras, and that these other "sideline" classes like music history are often looked down upon and given less teacher energy because they are sort-of "fillers" that the school requires them to teach to fill up their class loads. And in music ed textbooks, it is almost appalling to me how little emphasis there is on planning of any kind. It gets lip-service and a few paragraphs ("You need to know what you're teaching, have a direction, blah blah blah"), but the main emphasis is on hitting standards. I am over-simplifying here, because obviously these textbooks and my professors want good teaching to take place (and they help give many examples of good teaching practices), but the general gist seems to be that planning is good, but not strictly necessarily in all contexts. My textbooks say to beware that you do too little planning, even if you are in charge of a performance group where you are mainly just rehearsing music. But why can't rehearsing music be subject to backwards planning and inquiry as well? Aren't pieces of music just the texts you use to get to certain understandings??
I guess the whole reason I went on that huge tangent up there is because THIS class is forcing me to compare the practices of Wilhelm and Wiggins/McTighe to what I am learning in music ed, and to the ways I was taught music AND English AND every other subject as I was growing up. And when I look back, I am grossly disappointed. I understand that a performance group needs to take chunks of time to learn and play music. And performing groups are huge places of belonging and camaraderie, so it's not like a lack of inquiry based instruction in music classes has made students students hate music. But what if this type of instruction WERE used in those type of groups? What if this stuff wasn't limited to English, like we are doing, and it was extended to Math and Science and Music History and every subject under the sun! Both of our textbooks cite examples from the other subjects, so I know that backwards planning and inquiry-based design shouldn't be limited. But it seems that students could be SO much more engaged, feel SO much more involved, and SO much more INVESTED in these other subjects if these practices were extended to them!
I'd better answer the actual required questions here so I don't get TOO off track. But it seems that real, engaging instruction is instruction that is well-planned and purposeful. It has to fit in with a greater whole, because then it makes logical sense to students as time goes on. If a student gets a little of this and a little of that thrown in here and there, what is the point? Kids aren't stupid - and I think they want to be treated like they are capable of complex thinking. Engaging instruction also has to hook students by involving them personally. This closely relates to what we have been discussing in our concurrent class, Ed-Literacy 444: prior knowledge. If you have complex ideas or concepts students need to understand, then you need to backtrack far enough to engage their prior knowledge and build upon that. Then they can put a personal claw into the topic, so to speak, and then sort-of crawl up from there into these new areas of understanding. In here, that relates to our frontloading activities, which ask students to connect big questions to their own lives. I suppose we need to get that hook or claw or whatever activated, where they can connect something personally to their own lives and get really rooted in an Essential Question so that they will continue to be engaged in the learning they do together throughout units.
Here is a kind-of fun picture I found that offers a simplified visual representation of what inquiry-based learning looks like. I just thought it was a fun way to look at things.
It doesn't quite follow exactly what we are doing, but I liked it.
Friday, February 25th
Text Timeline (to visualize this in my brain)
I wanted to graph this somewhere where I could easily modify it and change it as I need to, so I figure I'll do it here. I feel like I need a visual of the weeks for my unit and where my texts will fit into those weeks.
Speckled Band"
Speckled Band"
source documents
source documents?
Thursday, February 17th
Addendum to my Unit Topic Memo
After looking looking at the resources more, I think I would like to use an assortment of little folk tales I found online, "A Horseman in the Sky," "Tell Tale Heart," and "The Adventures of the Speckled Band." Maybe I can work on each text or type of text for a week or so, and then spend two weeks at the end on "The Adventures" because it is a longer text. I want to expose students to lots of different types of texts involving folklore and mystery, and perhaps begin with more accessible folklore. I want to connect folklore (which is often written based on a mystery that wasn't solved) to other, more traditional mystery texts and some spooky texts ("Tell Tale Heart" will serve as my spooky text).
Now that I have processed this more in my brain, I think I would like to focus on a few key enduring understandings and their associated learning standards:
For my final project, I am thinking of switching things from my original plan. Perhaps, at the end, I could give them a choice of folk tales and have students re-write the folk tales as a short mystery that gets solved. Or, I can give students the option of taking a mystery and turning it into a folk tale. I can provide a few mystery and folk tale choices so that students have some element of choice and interest, and I can make a rubric with very specific elements so that their writings contain key items we talked about.
Sunday, February 13th
Annotated Unit Plan Portfolio Assignment #1 - Unit Topic Memo!
The second quarter 8th grade English unit in the Meridian School District is called "Mysterious Circumstances." In the curriculum, it says the Unit Topic is "Mysterious Circumstances" and the Conceptual Lens is "Investigation." This leads me to infer that maybe this unit can be driven by investigation (dur) but that it could involve research, interacting with different types of texts, and sifting through muddy stories/data/issues and trying to come up with conclusions during and afterward. I am a little confused about how to go about this - but I know we will figure it out!!
List of Resources:
There are many suggested unit resources listed with this unit. Many of them are story selections from a Prentice Hall textbook, and they could be pretty useful. They include these stories:
"The Adventures of the Speckled Band"
"Tell Tale Heart" (I would like to try to use this text, but only for selfish reasons - I just like it a lot)
"Glow in the Dark"
"Lights in the Night"
"The Horseman in the Sky"
"The Landlady"
There are also several selections of reading from the textbook, like sections entitled "Strange Doings," "Extraordinary in the Ordinary," and "American Folk Tradition." It also lists the possibility of using the Write Source 2000 and using student-selected mystery titles.
I don't really know much about these short stories, but I think I would like to see if I can find a greater variety of materials. I would like to get some conflicting primary source documents, if I can, to help students get some experience with wrestling through and "investigating" different accounts of one event/time/something.
Learning Goals and Standards:
Meridian has a huge list of "Critical Skills" (divided into Standards, which contain Goals which then contain specific Skills) that are expected to be taught at any time during the school year (though the unit and the methods are up to the teacher's discretion). This list is valuable - but it is also 18 pages long, so I have compiled a basic list here:
- Reading Process (acquire concepts about texts via analyzing organizational structures/features/graphics of texts, decoding texts using word parts, acquire fluency, develop vocab and concept understandings, etc.)
- Comprehension and Interpretation (acquire skills/strategies for comprehending text [e.g. distinguish cause and effect relationships, make inferences, apply ideas, generate how/why/what-if questions to texts, understand organization, respond to text, understand literary devices, etc.)
- Writing Process (be able to pre-write, generate ideas, make drafts, revise/edit/proofread, conference with others, publish writing with audience in mind, etc.)
- Writing Applications (write narratives using specific types of language, write technical text, write expository essays, write persuasive essays, respond to literature, etc.)
- Writing Components (acquire handwriting skills, write legibly and fluently, be able to spell words correctly, acquire skills for sentence structure, use conventions, apply capitalization and punctuation correctly, etc.)
- Communication (acquire listening skills, be able to summarize info from many sources, evaluate the credibility of a speaker, acquire speaking skills, organize an aural presentation, use verbal and non-verbal communication, etc.)
THEN there is a whole section about "Reading Strategies" to use before, during, and after reading, and then there is a whole section just on PACE that outlines the specific skills (organized according to Standards, like above) that should be honed during this project. Sigh.BUT - towards the end, each unit has a Unit Planner page! It has a web-type organizer graphic, which lists the unit topic and then other topics that branch out from that unit topic. Each unit also has lists of suggested unit resources (with books, poems, and stories listed), a list of required "Enduring Understandings," and suggested "Guiding Questions." There is also a section of Required Critical Content, which I bet I should focus on. These content ideas/standards are:
My list of all this stuff is to help me see a summarized, year-long overview of what should be learned while peeking at the smaller pieces on which I should focus. Does that make sense? I am guessing that I should focus on the sort-of understandings required in this "Critical Content" while throwing in the more specific "Critical Skills" listed above to help achieve these understandings.
Essential Questions:
I am having trouble making these questions sexy. Here are my beginning thoughts:
What makes a mystery? What are some real-life mysteries occurring today?
Where do folk tales come from? How do you know the difference between "truth" and "folklore?"
What is "the truth?" How can you tell what really happened, what was really said, and who was really there?
How can one event be described so differently by different people?
Ideas for Culminating Performance Assessment:
I was thinking of doing a sort-of project, where I give students a few documents that tell conflicting stories about something (a situation at the gas station? a religious experience? a spooky event from the 1750s? I don't know yet...), and then ask them to do something with these documents. Maybe look at all of them and write a news article trying to explain what happened while taking into account the different sources and trying to come to some conclusion (perhaps coming to the conclusion that there is NO conclusion!). Or maybe doing a presentation that shows the discrepancies between the sources? Some sort of project that asks students to reason through the documents, try to figure out a basic idea of what happened, identify the difference between the sources, try to posit why those differences exist, and maybe piece together what could have happened based on incomplete data. I want to tie it to the folklore somehow - maybe two of the documents could be semi-factual accounts and one could be a folk-tale about this event. Hmmmm.
Monday, January 31st - Learning!
Well, even though this post is abysmally late, I will weigh in.
Concerning the meaning of the word "learning," my perception of this has changed dramatically over just the last couple of weeks. The Understanding by Design book has highlighted a lot of interesting discrepancies for me between the idea of "good teaching" and "student achievement" and the actual act of "learning" something. As I look back over my schooling over the years, I realize how little I was actually expected to demonstrate real "learning." Instead, I was asked to regurgitate facts or ideas that someone else had told me, or asked to plug different numbers into the same type of problem. I hadn't considered that the hallmark of real learning is the ability to take your knowledge and then apply it to different situations in new ways, and now I realize that I didn't really learn much at all in some of my classes. Even now, as I am reading these textbooks, I see myself thinking about my reading in a new way. Am I just skimming this so I can check this chapter off in my planner? Can I summarize what this book said in my own words when I am done with the chapter? Will I remember enough of it to be able to reference it in our classroom discussions? I feel like I can't be as complacent anymore, because this is stuff I really want to REMEMBER and be able to, again, transfer to other environments and situations.
After reading Wilhelm chapters, I also am hoping that this book will help us to better understand how assess whether learning is happening in the classroom. I am excited at the prospect of introducing students to a new topic of learning by presenting them with a conundrum, a puzzle, or some life situation that they will need to understand and learn how to solve throughout the course of a unit. It seems that the route to assessing real learning involves lots of questions to the students, and lots of creative ways of getting the students to ascend those levels of understanding and get to the "synthesis" level of Bloom's Taxonomy. This idea of backwards planning, using lots of in-the-moment, informal assessments, and using culminating assessments to determine whether you have guided students to greater levels of understanding and transfer of knowledge is really overwhelming to me. How do teachers have time to LIVE when all of this is going on? How do you not spend hours and hours carefully crafting these types of lessons? I have heard that the first two years of teaching are a doozy, but that after that it gets easier as you get quicker at planning and have a larger lesson/activity repertoire to draw from. But right now, it ALL looks overwhelming, and I am glad that this class is specifically focused on these aspects of lesson planning so that we can be better prepared.
Reflecting on these ideas about learning has made me think hard about the way my mentor teacher teaches. I have a lot of respect for this woman, and I am very grateful to have her as a mentor and to see the types of classes she teaches. She has one Literacy Lab, with 8 students who need extra help to succeed in their English classes, and then the rest of her classes are 8th grade honors English and 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Challenge. There is such a stark contrast between the Lab students and the Honors/Challenge students, and sometimes it is very frustrating for her because she tries to reach these higher levels of learning outcomes with her Lab students but it is like pulling teeth just to get them to answer questions. Her normal method of answering student questions is by asking them more questions. She says this drives her kids crazy sometimes, but I am noticing how much it initiates discussion and requires the students to really THINK about what they are saying. She tries to get the students to answer their own questions by making them reflect on what they already know and use it to figure out what they don't - if that makes sense. I think she provides a great model of the ways you can try to bring students to that higher level of understanding, and of the ways you can do informal assessments just though discussion. I feel like our class texts are a perfect supplement to my involvement in her classroom - I just hope that there is a way to integrate this type of learning and assessment for the kids who need "lab" classes. For them, they seem to need help with the simplest of skills, and even with very simple tasks they totally shut down when she asks any type of self-reflective question or doesn't give them a straight up answer. She says that you have to train your students to respond to her style of teaching. Maybe these lab students haven't been trained? They are used to just being given the answers? They don't care enough about school to want to have to do more than regurgitate facts? I don't know, and I don't know how to get over that hurdle. Hopefully over the course of the semester we will find out!
Sound Clips for my Learning Autobiography Presentation:
Clip #1: To represent my negative learning experiences...
Clip #2: To represent my positive learning experiences...